Dan Abnett - Know no fear. The Battle of Calth

Anchise lapses to automatic practical, taking his foe on in basic, close-hand measures to stop the blade. He half-rises to meet the Word Bearer, turning his left palm out to run in past the lunging knife, and turn the right wrist and forearm away. Simultaneously, he brings his right forearm up as a crossed block against the enemy’s face and chest.

Transhuman versus transhuman. It’s about mass and speed and power, about the application of accelerated strength and enhanced reaction time. Anchise’s hard block breaks the Word Bearer’s cheek, his pass turning the knife aside. But the Word Bearer is strong, and driven by a murderous fury. He circles the blade, stabbing at Anchise’s side and left arm. Anchise turns his right arm block into a jabbing punch, ramming his steel fist into the enemy’s throat which has been exposed thanks to the damaged gorget. The impact crushes something in the Word Bearer’s throat. His eyes bulge for a second, and blood jets from his mouth and nostrils. He attempts another savage stab, and the knifeblade scores Anchise’s right forearm through armour, flesh and muscle to the very bone.

Anchise is not going to lose the advantage. He places a second punch into the throat, and then a third, higher, into the misshapen jaw.

The Word Bearer’s head snaps back. Anchise feels rather than hears a sharp crack. He punches again to be sure. Then, as his foe drops, he wrenches the dagger out of his hand to make certain of things.

The hand that he uses to grasp it tingles. The wound made by the knife in his forearm throbs.

He freezes.

Something opens in his mind. Despite the burning forest around him, everything is very cold. There is a sterile blue light. Something pulses. Anchise can hear a deep, cosmic heartbeat. He can smell neurotoxin and molecular acid. He cannot see it, but he has a sense of something uncoiling, something vast, something black, something scaled and greasy, something coated in a heavy caul of grey mucus. He can feel it unwrapping, expanding out of a pit that’s older than all the eons, moving up through the eternal darkness of Old Night and the interstellar gulf, moving towards the light of the burning forest. Moving towards him.

It can smell him. It can taste his pain. It can hear his thoughts.

Closer. Closer. Closer.

Anchise cries out and hurls the black glass dagger away. The door in his mind slams shut.

He is breathing hard, shaking. The wound in his arm will not stop bleeding.

He knows he needs the vox. It doesn’t matter if they haven’t got the time or opportunity to stop and set up. He needs the vox.

If someone’s out there, if anyone’s listening, they need to hear him. They need to know.

They need to know what they’re facing.

On. Off.

On. Off.

On.

Maintain activation. Maintain. Wake.

Trapped and blind. Helpless. Deprived of consciousness for so long, he has lost all sense of when now is or what now is.

He knows fear.

He is Telemechrus.

He has been taught things, and one of them is to control his anger until it is needed. It is probably needed now.

He lets his go. He lets it replace the abomination fear.

He analyses. He scans. He determines.

His determination is this: he is still in his casket, and his hibersystems have shut down. No, they have been interrupted. By a comm signal. An encrypted vox signal.

He was woken by an encrypted vox transmission that triggered an auto-response in his casket support system.

His casket is damaged. Telemechrus does not believe he can get out of it. He calls out, but there are no venerables around to counsel or help him.

There is no one around.

He will know no fear. He will know no fear.

His implant clock tells him that he has been dormant for a little over eleven hours. External sensors are down. He can’t see. He can’t open the casket. There is no noosphere. There is no data inload.

There is only the vox signal that woke him. He clings to that. He tries to decrypt it.

His inertial locators tell him that he is stationary. They record, eleven hours earlier, an extreme displacement followed by a kinetic trauma spike that was too intense to fully measure. He does not remember that. Hiberstasis must have shut him down before it happened.

Motion sensors light.

There is something close by. Something approaching his casket.

Friend or foe? He has no data. No means of determination. He cannot target. The casket is trapping him. He cannot even discharge his weapons while he is locked in the box.

Friend or foe?

Something strikes the outer shell of his casket and slices through the clamps. Something pulls the hatch open.

‘Are you alive in there?’ a voice asks.

Telemechrus suddenly gets optic feed input. Light. He can feel air flow against his skin, even though he has no skin.

The voice comes from the figure silhouetted against the light.

‘Respond,’ the voice says. ‘Are you capable of activity, friend?’

Telemechrus tries to reply, but his voice does not work. There is a whirr. A whine. A dry gasp of sonics. He engages his cyberorganics, drives power to his articulated limbs, shakes off the tingling numbness of stasis, and levers himself forward.

Clumsy and inelegant, he clambers out of the casket. The figure moves back to let him out.

He steps out of the casket, crushing rock fragments and glass to powder beneath his feet. He feels sunlight on his face, though he has no face. He stretches out his ghost spine, stretches his remembered arms.

His weapon pods engage. Power couplings light up. Feeds flow live. He looks down at the figure who freed him.

‘Thank. You. Lord,’ he manages to say.

‘You know me?’ the warrior asks.

‘Yes. Tetrarch. I. Identified. Your voice. Pattern.’

Eikos Lamiad nods.

‘That’s good. My face is not as recognisable as it once was.’

Telemechrus adjusts his optic feed and zooms in on the great tetrarch. Lamiad’s visual profile does not match the one stored in Telemechrus’s autostack memory.

Lamiad’s glorious golden armour is dented and scorched. The famous porcelain half of his face is cracked and disfigured. The intricate mechanism of the left eye is ruined.

His left arm is missing from just above the elbow, leaving nothing but a buckled stump of armour, and a cluster of torn fibernetic cables, broken ceramite bone-form, and frayed artificial muscles. With his right hand, Lamiad leans on his broadsword as though it were a walking staff.

‘You. Are. Hurt. Lord Champion.’

‘Nothing that can’t be repaired,’ replies Lamiad. ‘Except, perhaps, my heart.’

‘You. have. Sustained. Cardiac damage? Which. Vessel?’

‘No, friend. I meant it metaphorically. Do you understand what’s happened today?’

‘No. Where. Am I?’

Lamiad turns and gestures. Telemechrus adjusts his optic scope and pans out, wide, tracking. A desert area. The sky is dark and mottled with heat-strong blotches. A heat-blotch in the near distance represents a building structure of significant size, which is on fire. More distant but perhaps larger heat-blotch/fires can be identified and plotted. The desert is littered with debris, much of it Legion materiel, much of it apparently destroyed by impact. Telemechrus tracks around. He scans his own casket, crumpled, half-buried in an impact crater. Smashed storage pods and equipment containers are scattered all around. There are two other caskets.

Telemechrus checks for a noospheric, but there is none. He cannot patch and configure a global position with any accuracy.

‘You fell from a low orbit facility,’ says Lamiad. ‘Two of your kind fell at the same time, but their caskets were already damaged and they did not survive.’